Sean Hollister

On March 18th, Nvidia will release a two-hour demo for Half-Life 2 owners, showing what its RTX 50 cards can do: full ray tracing, subsurface scattering for translucent skin, volumetric light through fog and smoke, physically-based materials, and Nvidia’s new neural shaders — which are also coming to DirectX for other developers in April.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that Keita Takahashi gets no royalties from his quirky roll-up-the-world’s-objects-into-a-blob game series — which wouldn’t terribly surprise me. Royalties aren’t common in an industry that doesn’t treat workers well in general. But I imagine he’s getting something from cute licensed products with his name on them, right? Right?

Do you have an OG Asus ROG Ally with a 40Wh pack? Jsaux, the biggest name in handheld accessory innovations, is now selling a 65Wh upgrade kit for $80. It comes with a slightly thicker back cover and an extended heatsink too. If that’s not enough battery, iFixit’s slightly hackier mod can give you an ROG Ally X-beating 88Wh. Jsaux seems to be out of stock, but you can smash a “notify me” button.

This is the new Dynabook Portégé Z40L-N, and it’s not quite what I’m asking for — while it does unusually have its own dedicated compartment, this 56Wh battery is more user-serviceable than swappable. Some other laptops offer that too. But what if you could carry a second battery with you, charge it outside of the laptop (maybe integrated USB-C), then toollessly swap at a moment’s notice?